In an environment where the normal interaction between two communicating entities only requires a short request from the initiator and a short response from the receiver, a simple and efficient protocol mechanism can be designed to provide the carriage for such messages. The problem with many new environments, such as the Internet/World Wide Web is that a simple short request for information can result in a long response being returned (in essence, a response of variable size). It is difficult to design carriage protocols which operate efficiently in environments where the size of the response message is not known or determinable apriori by the request initiator. Protocols available in the public domain such as X.25 and TCP are designed around either a maximum size limit for a short request and response exchange (as shown in FIG. 2) or around a long lived connection where the protocol can accommodate any size request or response message exchange (as shown in FIG. 3). This later mechanism requires the use of a segmentation and reassembly protocol where the long message is segmented into smaller fixed size packets, usually of up to the maximum transfer unit (MTU) size for transmission, and an inverse reassembly function at the receiving side. Thus, a need exists for a protocol that efficiently handles both transaction type communications (short request and short response) as well as connection-oriented communications in a wireless environment. This protocol would preferably be optimized for transaction type messaging and could also handle long message responses as typically found in World Wide Web browsing activity.